After a while Yorgh peeped out in time to see the last of the pursuers descending the steps. Then it was dark again.
"I can see the stars," murmured Vaneen.
Yorgh looked up. It was true.
"And, Yorgh...?"
"Yes?" he asked, feeling light of heart at having succeeded in escaping the Raydowers for the time being.
"I ... am beginning to believe your story about finding the metal stick in the desert. I'm sorry I said what I did."
Yorgh chuckled and reached out for her in the dark. He pulled her to him and found her soft lips with his. After the first instant, she slipped strong young arms about his waist and strained her body against his.
"That's ninety-nine you owe me," said Yorgh, taking a deep breath.
Vaneen pretended to pull back from him, with a low laugh.
Abruptly, following a quiet click, the place was flooded by a white glare that was like a blow on his eyes. When he could see again, they were still the only ones there ... except for a skeleton on a couch across the wide, cluttered chamber ... and another on the floor beside a long table with many drawers.
"What is it?" gasped Yorgh.
"I don't know. My shoulder touched something on the wall beside the door, and—"
The place was filled with strange furnishings. Some were wooden and seemed to sag here and there; most were queer things of metal. Overhead, a transparent roof offered a good view of the stars.
Cautiously, with Vaneen crowding close, Yorgh walked around the chamber. There were other doors, and he tried his light at one of them. It obediently swung open to reveal what must have been sleeping quarters. Yorgh saw more bones, and let the door close again.
It was Vaneen who discovered the books. The writing and pictures on the smooth, pliable pages put to shame the few parchment records they had seen in the village of the Sea People.
Yorgh never remembered how many awed hours they spent looking at the strange instruments and colored maps and other curiosities. The sky, he did recall later, was showing light when he made his little mistake.
"This must be a place of the Old Ones of the legends," Vaneen was murmuring as Yorgh fingered a series of little studs on one of the machines.
Suddenly, there was whirring motion under his hand. He leaped back, startled. A humming grew from nowhere, followed by a scratching sound that culminated in a loud snap.
A tired voice spoke, sounding so near and natural that Yorgh dropped a hand to his knife and looked about.
"World Four of the Kithgol planetary system reporting on the hundred and sixty-first day of the plague. Urgently request the dropping of medical supplies detailed in last report, but advise against any attempt to land here. The plague is still uncontrollable, even animals, with few exceptions, being wiped out.
"Little hope for survival of this colony. Personnel of this station remain in strict quarantine, and will not venture out to mingle with other colonists in hopes of maintaining communication to the last...."
There was more, but Yorgh was satisfied.
He backed away from the talking thing, and saw that Vaneen's face was as white as his own felt.
"Let's go down again," he whispered through dry lips. "It's getting light."
He would have accepted a look of scorn for such a weak excuse, but the girl followed meekly. The door opened as soon as he got his light within a yard of it, and they crept guiltily down the stairs cut out of solid rock.
There were no Raydowers about until Yorgh and Vaneen came wearily down the last flight of steps on the face of the cliff. Jayn was waiting there in the little clearing, with Ueln and a crowd of villagers, spearmen prominently to the fore.
"The spirits let you return!" murmured Jayn, her face strained and pale.
There was a general air of shrinking back among the crowd, although Yorgh did not see anyone actually move his feet.
"I swear," said Ueln, "that they must have been all the way inside the shrine. I followed right to the Portal!"
"That is true enough," said Yorgh, waiting a few steps up to see what they would do.
He wondered if he could impress them with his light. He held it in his hands.
"Then, the sooner you go, the better!" said Jayn bitterly. "If the spirits let you go, we may not touch you. But I do not care to keep you around until you bring certain disaster upon the village."
An old woman whispered in her ear, and she looked sharply at Vaneen.
"And you took the girl with you?" she demanded.
"Of course," he replied. "And if you are really anxious to have us gone, I think you should give us wollies to ride."
"You can have all the animals my cousin took from the flatland!" she snapped. "But first, another matter!"
An old man was pushed to the forefront of the crowd. He smoothed his white beard nervously and peered up at Yorgh and Vaneen with faded, short-sighted eyes.
Abruptly, he found his voice, and rattled off a brief, chanting patter. Then he stepped back behind a spearman who looked to Yorgh as if he would be poor protection.
"What was that, a curse?" demanded the Hunter, having had difficulty understanding the rapid words mumbled from the old man's toothless mouth.
To force an answer, he twisted the metal cylinder to flash the light at them.
"No," gulped Jayn, her eyes riveted upon the object in his hands. "He married you. It's the only thing that might possibly lessen the sacrilege. You were up there a long time."
She looked up at him bitterly.
"Oh, Yorgh! Why did you have to take that wench with you?"
Vaneen, who had been so quiet behind his shoulder, spoke at last.
"And I didn't even give him a tunic with a fur collar," she said.
Jayn flushed, then paled as she bit her red lower lip; and Yorgh saw that the comment must have struck a deeper wound than could days of kitchen drudgery.
He didn't know what to say; but his silence must have seemed threatening, for Ueln spoke up.
"I will ride after him, and make plain to his people how we brought him and the girl to the mountains," he offered.
"A good idea!" said Jayn, with an undertone in her voice that made Yorgh think of a cornered ponadu. "Just to be safe, and to make sure they take him back, we'll all go!"
Yorgh and Vaneen glanced at each other, but soon found that the Raydowers were in earnest. Before noon, they found themselves leading the hastily assembled column from the village out onto the grassy plain beyond the foothills.
There, another surprise waited them.
The Hunters, mostly on foot, save for a dozen on half-tamed wollies, met them at the first clump of trees, where some of their dark tents were pitched.
"We were just about to follow your trail in," cried Kwint, riding up to Yorgh with a grin splitting his features. "Do I see our run-away wollies being herded along there?"
"You do," said Yorgh, conscious that Ueln had pulled up beside him, looking glum. "This is Ueln of the Raydowers. He ... caught them for us."
Kwint looked hard at both of them, but held his peace. Vaneen had ridden straight to her father.
"I gave the metal stick to Yorgh as you told me, Father," she said, staring him levelly between the eyes. "I hope you have no more such errands."
She slipped down from her mount, and headed for their tent.
"She's tired," said Yorgh to Puko, whom he found at his knee.
Tefior looked about weakly, and finally thought to close his mouth.
"The least you could do," Yorgh told him, "is to offer our friends here meat, to show there are no grudges."
Tefior licked his lips and began to give orders, but there was a puzzled frown on his brow.
Anyone but me, thought Yorgh, grinning, he would ask, but he is timid of the answers I might give him.
Things went very well after that. With the returned wollies, it was easy to move back to the camp at the creek, where the Hunters had left their carts and most of their baggage. The Raydowers willingly traveled with them, and were loaned tents to set up a camp of their own.
For eleven days, the tribes camped there, exchanging feasts, hunting together, and finding things to trade. Yorgh was gratified at how his advice was accepted by both sides, even though in fear by one of them. The Raydowers looked uneasy whenever he casually talked of traveling back with them.
There was only one untoward incident, which was quickly hushed up. As Yorgh was told the tale, Vaneen had taken Jayn to swim in the secluded bend of the creek. Somehow or other it happened that only the Hunter girl had dressed when she shrieked that she heard a ponadu in the woods.
Yorgh remembered the way Jayn's dark robes had fitted over the hips, and wished he had been there to see. Then he thought of her kitchen in the mountain village, and said no more on the subject.
When some of the Raydowers became friendly enough to talk, however, the story of his escapade with Vaneen got around.
Yorgh caught people glancing askance at him every time he turned around. He went to old Tefior.
"I suppose you have heard it all," he said. "If you do not think it best, I won't come to your fire to see Vaneen."
The chief looked over Yorgh's shoulder.
"Perhaps ... for the time being...."
Don't know why I took that for an answer, thought Yorgh, staring across the flatland the next morning at dawn. Suppose I tell him the Raydowers call us married? Would he just say their law doesn't count? Vaneen looks kindly at me from a distance, but she hasn't spoken.
He chewed moodily on a blade of grass, thinking that he heard a distant herd of kromp moving.
Then his head jerked up as a great flame ripped across the sky.
VI
There were shouts behind him in the camp, and he saw motion about the borrowed tents of the Raydowers.
A huge, gleaming thing sank down to the plain on a cushion of smoke and flame. The fires disappeared as it touched ground. A moment later, the thunder died out.
Yorgh became aware of someone yanking his arm.
"Come on!" yelled little Puko. "I have a wolly for you. You can flee to the mountains!"
Yorgh looked around, and most of the talk and bustle ceased. People, finding themselves still alive, stopped to stare at Yorgh. He saw a group hurrying over from the Raydower camp.
Why don't they look to Tefior or Jayn? he wondered peevishly.
The first words Jayn spoke when she panted up with Ueln and others of her people were, "You were wrong to go up there!"
"I do not think well of it," Tefior agreed sadly.
"This is what comes of violating the shrine!" shouted one of the Raydowers. "The spirits of the Old Ones have come to avenge themselves upon us all!"
"No!" roared Yorgh.
He stared around at them, then out across the plain where the great, gleaming thing stood upright with wisps of smoke curling up from the grass at its base.
"I brought it upon us; I will go!"
Jayn and Ueln stared at him with pale, sorrowful faces. Kwint fingered his bow, and seemed about to step forward. Puko did, but Tefior grabbed him by the hair.
Yorgh turned and walked slowly away.
"Yorgh! Wait!"
Vaneen ran after him.
"We'll go together! I was there with you!"
"No!" he groaned. "Jayn, she went because I took her. Kwint! Ueln! Hold her!"
He broke away and ran toward the thing on the plain, not thinking, not even hoping. The voices behind him died away.
After he had covered a quarter of a mile, he noticed that the metal thing was like the ships of the Sea People in some ways. It was rounded, like a hull, and its upthrust bow—
To his amazement, there were four men standing under it when he arrived. Yorgh gaped at their queer clothes.
"Well, look at him!" said one of them with a strange accent. "Is that what's been sending out a repetitive message that's well over two hundred years old? I thought the plague wiped this planet clean."
"Man!" exclaimed the one with the close-cropped red hair. "If we can find out why not, maybe we can stop it wherever it still pops up in the galaxy!"
It was late afternoon when Yorgh ambled back into camp.
A great sigh went up from the waiting groups when they saw that he was smiling.
"They are men!" he shouted. "Sons of the Old Ones—as are we! Tefior, Jayn, when I have told you, this will be a night for a feast!"
He told them of the strange men who said they came from the Terran Colonial Patrol in answer to a message from The World, which had long been shunned as a dead colony, dead of a plague still known among the stars.
He told how the Terrans had taken blood from his arm and looked at it in a queer machine, whereupon they had grown talkative and excited.
"They said they will send people to teach us the forgotten ways of the Old Ones, because we are the first they have found who do not die of the sickness," he concluded. "Just for bringing them kromps and other animals to help cure the sickness, they will see that we have all we need to stand beside them, as brothers."
And he told how one of the Terrans had knocked a kromp unconscious with a small machine in his hand, to get some of its blood.
"I will show you," he grinned, thinking of a tremendous joke. "Where is Moyt?"
The others pushed the tall, blond Moyt forward.
"Is there any reason why you would not like to marry Jayn, who is the first of the Raydower women?" Yorgh asked.
"I—" began Moyt suspiciously, and stiffened as Yorgh pressed the trigger of the Terran stunner he held inside his tunic.
Moyt got control of his knees and straightened up as Yorgh turned off the power.
He started to open his mouth angrily, and Yorgh stunned him again. Moyt slumped to his knees beside Jayn.
The Raydower woman's lips curved in a thoughtful smile, and she reached out to run a finger through Moyt's hair. The man had changed his mind about protesting by the time the second shock had worn off.
Then Yorgh sat down to answer question after question while preparations for the night's feast went on. The men gathered and voted that messengers should be sent to the Sea People to tell of what had happened. Someone shouted Yorgh's name to be chief of the three tribes, and the cry was taken up over his protests.
"Well, I'll take a walk and think about it," he said finally, and strolled up the creek for a breather.
In the quiet of the trees, he shook his head to see if he would wake from the dream, but the only result was that he heard voices.
He lengthened his stride and caught up with a group of the young women.
"Where are you going?" he asked amiably.
"We were going swimming before the feast," answered pert Ahnee, "but if there is to be a ponadu named Yorgh in the woods—"
"I won't bother you," he grinned, "if you will tell me where Vaneen is."
"She went ahead alone when we stopped to hear what all the shouting was for. She is anxious to try the new dress of white wool that Jayn gave her."
"Oh," said Yorgh, wrinkling his brow. "Well, in that case, I must ask you girls to find another part of the creek."
"What!" cried Ahnee. "Yorgh, you oughtn't!"
"The Raydower elder said a marriage spell over us, didn't he? Now, will you go, or must I show you what happened to Moyt?"
"We'll go!" squealed Ahnee hastily, as the other girls faded back from beside her. "But it was said that you did not mean to hold her to that foreign ceremony."
"I must obey everyone's laws," said Yorgh, "now that I am to be chief of all the tribes."
He thought he heard splashing a little way up the creek, and grinned to himself at the vision in his mind.
"But it is well known that you told Tefior—"
"Argh!" said Yorgh. "It is well known that I seldom speak in earnest!"